Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

    Michael Dickman's first full-length collection of poems demonstrates each brilliantly....These are lithe, seemingly effortless poems, poems whose strange affective power remains even after several readings. Again and again the language seems to disappear, leaving the reader with woven flashes of image, situation, emotion....These are durable poems from one of the most accomplished and original poets to emerge in years."—The Believer"With vacant space and verbal economy, his work suggests volumes." —Poets & Writers The poems in Michael Dickman’s energized debut document the bright desires and all-too-common sufferings of modern times: the churn of domestic violence, spiritual longing, drug abuse, and the impossible expectations fathers have for their sons. In a poem that references heroin and “scary parents,” Dickman reminds us that “Still there is a lot to pray to on earth.” Dickman is a poet to watch.You can go blind, waitingUnbelievable quietexcept for their soundingsMoving the sea aroundUnbelievable quiet inside you, as they changethe face of waterThe only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when we were twelveSunlight all over his facebreakingthe surface of somethingI couldn’t seeYou can wait yourwhole lifeMichael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and began writing poems “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and The American Poetry Review.

    Whittled down to song and fragments of story, these poems teeter at the edge of dread. A gang of unchaperoned children, grappling with blame and forgiveness, speak with tenderness and disdain about “the mothers” and “the fathers,” absent figures they seek in “the faces of clouds” and in the cars that pass by. Other poems investigate the force of maternal love and its at-times misguided ferocities. The final poem, a long sequence of nocturnes, eschews almost everything but the ghostly erotic. These are bodies at the edge of experience, watchful and defamiliarized.

    J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.

    Like the boundary between our sun's sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle's work. An online reader's companion will be available.

    But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.

    THIS CAN'T BE LIFE is Dana Ward's first full-length collection of poetry. Although some of this writing may look like prose, everything here is written both AS, and under the sign of, "poetry." THIS CAN'T BE LIFE is an infinite frame-dissolve between art and life engined by the thoughts and feelings associated with the relationship between mortality and politics. These things, working together and against one another, constitute the funeral fun-house physics which delimit the (temporary) reality in which the book operates. Following Notley and Kerouac, Ward's poetics is a generative problematics of voice in which "the counter-poised figures of porousness, multiplicity, & instability are first principals."

    West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities--to their portrayal in the media--and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http: //sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

    The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

    Plato would have loved them."—Ann LauterbachIn a world where we find "everything helping itself / to everything else," Anna Moschovakis incorporates Craigslist ads, technobabble, twentieth-century ethics texts, scientific research, autobiographical detail, and historical anecdote to present an engaging lyric analysis of the way we live now. "It's your life," she tells the reader, "and we have come to celebrate it."

    . . still at work on his almost-song of himself” (The New York Times Book Review).In both lively prose poems and more formal verse, Philip Levine brings us news from everywhere: from Detroit, where exhausted workers try to find a decent breakfast after the late shift, and Henry Ford, “supremely bored” in his mansion, clocks in at one of his plants . . . from Spain, where a woman sings a song that rises at dawn, like the dust of ages, through an open window . . . from Andorra, where an old Communist can now supply you with anything you want—a French radio, a Cadillac, or, if you have a week, an American film star.The world of his poetry is one of questionable magic: a typist lives for her only son who will die in a war to come; three boys fish in a river while a fine industrial residue falls on their shoulders. This is a haunted world in which exotic animals travel first class, an immigrant worker in Detroit yearns for the silence of his Siberian exile, and the Western mountains “maintain that huge silence we think of as divine.”A rich, deeply felt collection from one of our master poets.

    . .-from "Notes From"In her fourth remarkable collection, Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the slave rebellion on the Amistad and to the artists' canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander's most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America's most lively and gifted writers."Alexander is an unusual thing, a sensualist of history, a romanticist of race. She weaves biography, history, experience, pop culture and dream. Her poems make the public and private dance together." --Chicago Tribune

    The much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott Heron, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde.

    During that time, some of these poems appeared in various journals and on Web sites, including The Poetry Daily site, which ran thirty of Lehman's poems in as many days throughout the month of April 1998. For The Daily Mirror, Lehman has selected the best of these "daily poems" -- each tied to a specific occasion or situation -- and telescoped two years into one. Spontaneous and immediate, but always finely crafted and spiced with Lehman's signature irony and wit, the poems are akin to journal entries charting the passing of time, the deaths of great men and women, the news of the day. Jazz, Sinatra, the weather, love, poetry and poets, movies, and New York City are among their recurring themes. A departure from Lehman's previous work, this unique volume provides the intimacy of a diary, full of passion, sound, and fury, but with all the aesthetic pleasure of poetry. More a party of poems than a standard collection, The Daily Mirror presents an exciting new way to think about poetry.

    Andrew Hudgins imagines himself in the life of a now largely forgotten poet, Sidney Lanier, who served as a soldier for the Confederacy.